Just after that, I was fortunate enough to get a post Featured. Written originally for this blog, I also put Managing Your Real Estate Reputation on the Web up on my AR blog. I don't usually cross-post the material to both sites, but I thought the AR community might be interested in this article because of the topic.

Getting featured resulted in about 1/3 of my total page views for that one post as I've got on this site, since it launched. Big audience on ActiveRain.

And when it rains, sometimes it pours. I met my first clients through ActiveRain in April - Kevin Bungert and Susie Blackmon - and work has begun on their marketing projects.

October 27, 2007

Online video continues to be popular on the web - sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video and Veoh are both destinations to watch videos and clips - and also provide the tools to distribute your own content.

For real estate agents, these sites can be a valuable way to promote listings, market yourself and your agency, and gain exposure to viewers and search engines.

And using the web is extremely efficient. Content can added to multiple web sites like those mentioned above, and most sites provide options to embed your videos back into your own web sites or blogs. This has several benefits:

One, when you upload content, you have to set up a basic user profile - which can be customized with own information, images, web links etc. Many sites effectively offer the ability to set up your own channel. This is great for random visitors, and as destination to send your own clients.

Two, when you upload content to YouTube etc., they are hosting your videos for free, so there are no costs involved. Even when you embed your own movie into your own web site, they're bearing the hosting/bandwidth burden.

Three, the ability to "tag" or add "key words" to your content when you upload it to the web will make your videos very search engine friendly. Not only within the sites themselves, but more and more within the results of the major search engines.

Search engines like Google and Ask each have "video" specific searches, but they are also moving towards returning results that include photos, videos, blogs, and feeds - all on the same page. Google calls it Universal Search, and it means that there are new opportunities to show up in several different areas, for the same search terms.

It may be a round about way to get a visitor to your site - but does it really matter how they find you? Any experienced agent will tell you that they have clients that have come from stranger places!

And once your videos are online, they're out there working, promoting, extending your brand.